A Munich Court Declares Kunstmuseum Bern ‘Rightful Inheritor’ of Gurlitt Trove

The Kunstmuseum Bern. Photo by Andreas Praefcke, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, GNU Free Documentation license, Version 1.2.

A Munich court has decided that the Kunstmuseum Bern is the rightful inheritor of the Gurlitt collection, the DPA reports.

Art hoarder Cornelius Gurlitt bequeathed his collection, which allegedly includes hundreds of Nazi-looted artworks, to the Swiss museum.

The court rejected a challenge to Gurlitt’s will lodged by his cousin Ute Werner.

Shortly before he passed away, Gurlitt had struck a deal with German authorities, allowing them to research whether Nazi-looted artworks were in his trove.

So far, the German government has only identified three artworks as Nazi-looted, and has returned one.

Ute Werner has repeatedly criticized the lengthy process in the media, and has decided to leak documents found in Gurlitt’s possession–which he had inherited from his father, Nazi-era art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt–for transparency.


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